“”In the U.S. and Canadian elections now under way, the traditionally dominant political factors are giving way to a politics in which wedge issues such as John McCain’s “drill, baby, drill” and Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift program are pitting city folk against high-consumption, low-density rural voters.

…..That was tenuous at the time, and Sept. 11, 2001 looked like a decisive refutation. Both the Canada-U.S. and the Mexico-U.S. borders thickened, and integration languished.

But now, the U.S. and Canadian elections are travelling on parallel tracks, much more than in 2000. Each country seems to be dismantling its traditional electoral structure — in the U.S., one built around race, and in Canada, organized around regionalism. In both countries, the major parties are now fighting their election campaigns primarily along the same urban-rural battle line. For the first time, something like a single North American election is happening. This new politics is likely to be with us for a long time to come.